March 3, 2004

How is John Kerry going to keep from boring us to death over the next 8 months? The NYT has some ideas. I can't believe we won't become immediately exasperated with Kerry's oratorical style: at my house we were complaining about it a couple minutes into his acceptance speech last night. That tone, which he uses most when speaking to a crowd, works horribly on TV. The crowd/TV mismatch for Kerry is really as bad as Dean's was (when Dean would yell and growl and scare people). I'd like to see Kerry just take a vacation, a long vacation, maybe two months (four months!) and then come back when we've started to miss him. But I know he can't do that, because the Bush campaign will be--must be--unleashed. But I'm hoping he'll do his speaking in more intimate interviews, where he really does come across well. William Safire writes:

I remember conversations ... over the years with a serious, low-key senator whose thoughtful mien and earnest deliberation belied his down-the-line lefty voting record. I found Kerry to be a nice stiff, not a rigid stiff, who wears and worries well.

You really can warm up to a stiff. Well, it's Kerry's job now to prove that. I think it's true though. I hadn't liked him (or any of the Democratic candidates) very much, and then I watched one of those long, languorous C-Span campaign trail shows where they followed Kerry as he made his way from shop to shop in some small town in New Hampshire. Somewhere along the line, I started really liking him! It was a mystery. Maybe it's a bit like having a stuffy, old lawprof, who seems nowhere near as exciting as the younger, livelier profs, but somewhere along the line, you just start appreciating him.

Note to readers: I'm not committed to either party's candidate.

UPDATE: Wonkette also has some ideas for making the next 8 months interesting, including "Allow Donald Trump to select the vice president via a series of mock-governing contests. (Omarosa's 'White House' experience will finally come in handy!)"

FURTHER UPDATE: Re how long it would take before we'd start missing Kerry, a reader writes: "I can only say you must have a much, much higher boredom tolerance than I do. When trying to figure out how many months it would take before I missed Kerry, I run out of finger and toes pretty quickly, and my gut tells me I'm nowhere near the right number at that point. Maybe I should try again with years, or perhaps decades would be safer."